I didn’t do a lot of work coding this past week. Instead, I tried to focus on my reading, as well as planning my final project. Todd and I got together this past Friday, to work on the NotPacman game. This provided me the motivation to get this assignment completed. I spent a lot of time, as Kelly apparently did too, playing the game in order to test its functionality. Even when I knew certain functionality was working, making changes to the code might have resulted in the breaking of ‘seemingly’ unrelated code thereby requiring another round of testing. My wife began to think I was playing the game because I was having so much fun doing so. I did take a shortcut, however, that Kelly might not thought of: knowing that the generation of the balls works correctly, I tested with the game throwing only two balls onto the canvas so that I would not have to hunt down all 20 to ensure the game was completing properly. I did, however, play enough time with all 20 balls to get a low time of 16 seconds.

My mind didn’t go to this assignment as a game as Joe notes in his post. I was simply thinking in terms of getting it finished and checking off one more requirement this semester. I did take some time to refactor certain elements of my game after it was completed. And, as such, my goal was to make the code a little terser and, in my mind, somewhat more elegant.

Over the course of this week I found myself reflecting on our last class and the playing of Journey. I’m not a gamer, but playing the game in class was enjoyable. I felt a bit of guilt in that my game play went so long and that others in the class didn’t get a chance to participate, but my guilt was assuaged by the enjoyment of playing. Bringing up the game in general conversation at home I found out that we own a PlayStation. Who knew! I never paid attention. So, I downloaded it. I have played it several more times over the course of the week. I found myself immersed in the beauty of the game and have come to appreciate it as a work of art into which I can lose myself. It is a kind of beautiful, ambiguous mystery. And while most of the beauty is artfully scripted in the sense that agency as a player is diminished I find that to be a positive aspect of the game. Reflecting on my simple NotPacman experience I get a small sense of the complexity involved in creating a game. As I reflect on Journey, in which beauty trumps game-play complexity, I can’t even begin to think about how complex the development of Journey was. This was an experience that I had not expected; one that is causing me to think more deeply about the aesthetics of coding.